Virginia high school students plan mission to Mars

If you’re younger than 35, taller than 6-foot-2 or lacking in a background in a handful of very specific science and engineering fields, you’re out of luck if you’re hoping to train for a mission to Mars.

That’s according to a group of 60 Virginia high school juniors, who spent the past week at NASA Langley Research Center planning the theoretical Mission Zenith.

The group presented its final plan during the NASA Langley Centennial Symposium at the Hampton Roads Convention Center, showing attendees and a streaming audience online exactly what it would take — all $300 billion of it — to send five astronauts to Mars to collect samples and return to Earth.

The students took part in the free Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Scholars program through the Virginia Space Grant Consortium. The VSGC is a group of five colleges and universities, including Hampton University, the College of William and Mary and Old Dominion University, NASA, state agencies and other institutions that represent aerospace education and research.

“Each year we have typically around 500 students who take an online course for dual enrollment credit that is focused on the theme of exploration,” said VSGC Director Mary Sandy. “And then we use NASA and NASA’s missions and activities to teach a lot of science and technology, and the students who do well in the course are invited to one of three one-week residential academies that we do here at NASA Langley. And these students … have been designing a human mission to Mars and they’ve been working with NASA and industry mentors who have been guiding and helping them.”

This summer marks the 10th year of the program, which has hosted about 1,350 students in the residential summer academies.

The students were broken into five teams — Mission Integration, Science & Surface Operations, Mission Transit, Human Factors and Strategic Communications — that fed into planning the mission as a whole.

Each group presented what they were responsible for, and how they would achieve it. The Mission Integration team detailed the cost breakdown of the massive budget, as well as where crew members would come from. Each member should have specific backgrounds, such as a biologist with a specialty in botany, or a geochemist who understands climatology.

Partnerships with Roscosmos, Russia’s space program, and the European Space Agency would put an astronaut from each agency into the crew in return for instrument and sample analysis. Another partnership with SpaceX, the private corporation, would provide rockets needed to reach Mars, provided the SpaceX logo was painted on the sides.

The groups each answered questions about how they arrived at their final plans, having to justify the decisions they made.

Kevin Jurewicz, 17, a student at Isle of Wight Academy, worked on the Strategic Communications team.

“It’s been a lot of work, and it’s been a lot of relying on your team and other teams to get all the information in and then incorporate that into the final mission,” Jurewicz said. “I’ve really enjoyed it. The best part was probably working together, brainstorming ideas on how we should make the mission work for ourselves.”

Hammond can be reached by phone at 757-247-4951.